Serious Magnet Failure at CERN's New Accelerator 193
GrepNut writes "CERN is reporting that the giant magnets that steer the particle beam in the new and highly anticipated Large Hadron Collider have just failed catastrophically in a stress test, apparently due to a design oversight. It doesn't help that the magnets were designed and built by CERN's US competitor Fermilab." While safety precautions were followed, and no one was injured nor were any rifts in the space-time continuum opened, it's still a rather large setback for the project.
Re:Got what they deserved (Score:1, Insightful)
"What were they thinking contracting one of the most important components to Americans?"
Fermilab for some time stayed on top of the accelerator game (if they've ever really lost it) because their magnets made up for the radius/distance difference. Fermilab essentially builds the strongest magnets for these sorts of applications. The Europeans going to them was smart; they went to the best.
"It's just becoming an American tradition post-Challenger/Hubble/Star Wars that you got paid to do it multiple times until you get it right."
You are equating a construction project with unionized workers with high end particle physics testing and design that pushes the envelope.
The oversight was just that--an oversight. People do make mistakes, and unexpected things do happen. You are certainly not a scientist, because you'd know that most experiments have mistakes in them that are corrected later; the bigger the project, the more costly and noticeable the error, but they happen in all areas--you just don't hear about some bad gel run because it's not "news."
Should the oversight have been caught? Probably. But it seems to me that asymmetrical load testing not being performed should have been caught by anyone reviewing the paperwork of tests performed, and I'd be shocked if people on both sides of the Atlantic didn't have access to the tests done, and BOTH missed it.
One thing physicists certainly do care about besides results is something analogous--reputation. The Fermilab people are probably the most disappointed and shocked of the bunch, and all parties feel this--the Fermilab people because they built and tested the magnets, the CERN folks because they didn't check the paperwork carefully and the setback.
"Don't these people know the 6+ mile Boston "Big Dig" with only 2+ miles under the harbor has so-far cost almost as much as the 31-mile Chunnel?"
Yeah, because digging under the city with all the infrastructure above and nearby including property buyouts is similar to digging under the English Channel. Digging 2 tunnels is analogous to building a huge multilane vehicle passthrough. Building with reusable patented protected tunnel diggers essentially large face milling heads with minimum labor labor is akin to digging with conventional digging equipment.
Damn man, the two digging/tunnel projects aren't even analagous in the construction discipline, and you're bringing it up to a high end physics project MAGNET failure?
Yum, fried troll.
Re:There were no injuries (Score:1, Insightful)
redundant (Score:5, Insightful)
It's on a news site in the science section !
WTF ?Re:worst case scenario (Score:2, Insightful)
Its ironic how you gave that example of a man trying to fix the brakes on his own, if it was not for people like him we would still be swinging from tree to tree. Not a bad life except that you wouldn't have the option of complaining about it on some internet forum.
Re:Anti US Slant (Score:4, Insightful)
Working in a multi-national company with multi-national customers and designing safety-critical systems, I have some experience with handling mistakes. The best approach solving these technical issues, is to keep political games at bay as much as possible. Investigate thoroughly, take responsibility if you own the problem, then work on solving it. Once you start thinking "it's just that the other guys hate us" you've already lost. Any discussion will turn into a political slugfest, and lots of time will be wasted. The flipside is that you also need to keep good records - if someone tries to blame you for something you didn't do, you should have material to nip that in the bud. That works much better once you've gained a reputation for owning up to your own problems, btw.
Re:Give me a break (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree, and offer the ISS, the Internet, the Pentium that Windows is running upon, an Oil drilling platform, CERN, etc.
The point is, software programming is at the stage where electrical engineering was a century ago: tinkerers, with no real standards, trying new things. Sometimes they work, sometimes they explode. It was an exciting time, but it wasn't engineering. That didn't happen until standards came about, and at that point, we went from lightbulbs to radar installations.
Re:Anti US Slant (Score:3, Insightful)
At the very most it would be "anti that other organization".
Actually - Fermilab thinks no such thing.
Yes, they do. It's their press release, and their current thinking is that it's their fault. They may be mistaken, and probably hope they are, but they think it's their fault.
CERN _is_ making gratuitous :anti US" statements.
As pointed out many times in this discussion: the text posted at CERN's website was written by Fermilab. That's indicated by the title "Fermilab Statement on LHC Magnet Test Failure".
CERN *had* to have reviewed the magnet design
Well, I'm not familiar with the processes they use, but in my field a review is a way to help the designer, the designer still owns any defects which were not found in the review. In any case, CERN is not playing political games by posting Fermilab's statements.